The Dance of Creativity: Open vs. Closed Modes

In 1968, Dr. Spencer Silver was spending most of his days in St. Paul, Minnesota working in 3M’s central research lab. His assigned project was to develop a super-strong adhesive for aircraft construction.

The adhesive needed to withstand extreme conditions faced by aircrafts. Silver’s time in the lab was spent experimenting with different chemical combinations.

On one particular day in the lab, Silver mixed together two monomers and a reactant. But this time he decided to add an unusual amount of one chemical to the mix. Instead of creating a strong adhesive, Silver had accidentally produced a clear substance about the size of a paper fiber that acted like a tiny, weak glue droplet. 

Silver immediately recognized that he created something unusual. In his own words: "I was doing a procedure, and it didn't work the way I wanted it to. But I realized I had something unprecedented." The accidental discovery became the Post-It Note.

There’s an overlooked part of creative breakthroughs: the ability to switch between intense, purpose driven focus and curiosity driven exploration.

The dance of open and closed modes

In his famous speech, Creativity In Management, John Cleese shared the secret to creativity comes from working in two modes: open and closed.

In an open mode you're relaxed, playful, and curious for its own sake. Working in an open mode puts you into a state of exploration. The closed mode is just the opposite.  It’s the purposeful state you often spend time in while doing most work. It’s focused and anxious. There’s no place for humor or creativity in closed modes of work. 

Most people associate open modes of work to being in a child-like state — careless and free. These are moments when you step outside the grind. Because of this, open modes of work usually feel counter-productive. You may avoid them because it feels like you’re not making any progress on your objectives. This cuts you off from the creative source. Working in an open mode requires you to sit with the problems for long periods of time. Immerse yourself so deep into your work that you reach a point of near delusion. That’s when you finally stop taking things so seriously, allowing yourself to try new things.

The two modes of work are in a constant dance with each other. Closed work gives you depth and information to diverge your creativity in previously unavailable ways. “We need to be in the open mode when we’re pondering a problem,” Cleese says, “but once we come up with a solution, we must switch to the closed mode to implement it.” Both serve their purpose to do great work.

Balance open and closed modes for creativity

Spending too much time in one mode is detrimental to your work overall. 

Had Silver only operated in a closed mode, he never would have added more chemicals to his batch. There’s no serendipity in only closed states. You lose your edge when you spend too much time in one state. Free markets pay for creativity. The people that only know how to operate in a closed mode of work, or deliberately try to avoid it end up becoming cogs in a machine. They work great within systems. It’s hard to have an impact when you’re set to only play your part. Often they’re bound to constantly implementing first right answers. 

Just working in open modes doesn’t make you a creative genius. People that spend all their time working in a playful, ideation state begin to become their own problem. Being in a constant state of endless ideas means you implement nothing. There are many innovators that have managed to accomplish great things by working in a 24/7 open state. But only because they surrounded themselves with great implementors, executors, and operators that could make up for their shortcomings.

You will naturally gravitate towards one mode of work. It’s rare that anyone has a perfect 50/50. The balance will vary on multiple factors — in and out of your control.

Switching between open and closed modes

When Silver’s discovered the weak adhesive he failed to recognize the potential. 6 years later, he saw a practical solution after having a conversation with Art Fry.

An open state of work created the environment for the discovery, but Silver immediately switched back into a closed mode to look for an adhesive for aircrafts. This weak adhesive was not going to solve that. It takes deliberate effort to switch between the modes. 

You spend 98% of your efforts working in a closed mode. It’s easy for people to enter when focus sits at the core of it. Just put some headphones, type away at your computer (or whatever the natural of your work may be), and come up for air when you’ve finished the objective. 

Open modes are much harder to switch into. You must learn how to view problems from different perspectives. Play with various personas, approaches, or mental models to begin switching into a new state. Edward de Bono calls this the Six Hats, where you intentionally try on different “hats” to look at the problem in different ways. 

A rule of thumb: if you have to wonder if you’re in an open mode of work, you’re probably not.

When you find yourself in a situation where you need to be open, just try things until you find a path that sets a good direction for you to implement. Part of the fun of deliberately switching into an open state is that you get to play with your approaches.